He was still a year short of forty, and they say now that he would

have been in office and very probably in the new Cabinet if he had

lived. At school he always beat me without effort--as it were by

nature. We were at school together at Saint Athelstan's College in

West Kensington for almost all our school time. He came into the

school as my co-equal, but he left far above me, in a blaze of

scholarships and brilliant performance. Yet I think I made a fair

average running. And it was at school I heard first of the Door in

the Wall--that I was to hear of a second time only a month before

his death.

To him at least the Door in the Wall was a real door leading

through a real wall to immortal realities. Of that I am now quite

assured.

And it came into his life early, when he was a little fellow

between five and six. I remember how, as he sat making his

confession to me with a slow gravity, he reasoned and reckoned the

date of it. "There was," he said, "a crimson Virginia creeper in

it--all one bright uniform crimson in a clear amber sunshine

against a white wall. That came into the impression somehow,

though I don't clearly remember how, and there were horse-chestnut

leaves upon the clean pavement outside the green door. They were

blotched yellow and green, you know, not brown nor dirty, so that

they must have been new fallen. I take it that means October. I

look out for horse-chestnut leaves every year, and I ought to know.

The Door in the Wall And Other Stories